Tuesday, April 3, 2012

We entered the Knight News Challenge to help us fund our transition to LatinoCities. (Review our entry here.)

During the last couple of weeks, we've put a lot of effort into encouraging our readers and supporters to review our proposal and engage with it, by either liking, reblogging or commenting. I sent many Facebook direct messages to our friends.

Although the comment period officially ended March 29, we are still receiving positive responses and hope they continue to come in. So if you haven't had the opportunity to do so, here's the link again. Also, the Knight people are looking at Twitter engagement via the hashtag #newschallenge.

As of right now, our entry has enjoyed 37 Tumblr responses (Hearts, which equal "Likes", and/or reblogs), 217 "Likes" (recorded by clicking on the "Thumbs Up") and 64 comments.

Our goal was to be one of the top five entries in reader engagement. That way we would get to the next round automatically. But in viewing other entries, I found that a few received much more engagement than ours. So to get to the next round, it's going to be based mostly on the merits of our entry.

Initially, the organizers wrote that the entries going to the next round would be announced on April 2. Now, the website states, "By early April, we will select about 100 proposals for a second round of review."

After that, 10 or so entries will become finalists. Knight staff will spend the rest of April interviewing and conducting due diligence on that group and propose a group of winners to their board of trustees at its next meeting in mid-June.

So there you go. On to other tasks on our journey to launch LatinoCities...